My Awareness Has Been Raised. Now What?

You don’t just want people to sit on the couch feeling all aware, right?

The answer to the “now what?” question is one you should know before you even start your awareness raising activities.

Where is all of this leading eventually? At some point down the line, you want someone to do something.What is that thing?

Will you raise the awareness of people who would actually do that action themselves?

Or will you raise the awareness of people who might remember you and tell someone else that they should follow through on the action (“Hey, I saw something about an organization that did something like that somewhere. Let me see if I can remember . . . You should call them.” )?

For example, many content marketing activities don’t have direct calls to action. Instead, they are often about creating trust . . . trust that will lead you to donate when asked, use a service when you need it, or recommend the organization to a friend with a special interest. While that call to action may not be explicit in the content marketing, it should be part of that overall strategy.

During the new webinar I’m producing for CharityHowTo, How to Raise Awareness for Your Cause on a Budget (Join us Feb 19 or Feb 26), I’ll get into lots of activities you can do to raise awareness. But we’ll start the conversation here, talking about your long-term goals and specific calls to action. It just doesn’t make sense to invest in any awareness raising until you know what you want people to do next.

How are you explicitly or implicitly connecting your general awareness raising work to more specific calls to action? Share your experience in the comments!

Our very small, very new nonprofit is currently designing a year-long crowdfunding campaign, The first goal is to raise awareness and engagement. An important part of that is empowerment of the individual (“You can change the world too!”). Once that’s established, the empowerment message leads into the donation “ask” — “You can change the world, too… here’s how, donate now.” I think of it as a slow progression, almost the way a good book is built. It flows together in such a way that you expect what happens at the end, and are satisfied that the conclusion you anticipated is what you got.